Upgrading the VCSA and converting to embedded PSC

This week I’ve been playing in our vCenter lab and tested the upgrade to 6.7 U1 and also changing the deployment type to vCenter with embedded PSC.

I must say that the vCenter team has done a great job on the upgrade process over the last year. Both our migration from the Windows vCenter to the VCSA as well as the upgrade of a VCSA works well and there are lots of great documentation.

Our lab deployment consists of one vCenter VCSA running 6.7 and an external PSC. Both have been migrated from a Windows vCenter and later upgraded to 6.7.

With the release of 6.7 U1 and the new convergence guide for converting from an external PSC to an embedded, and with the fact that this is now the preferred deployment from VMware, we wanted to perform this process in our lab.

There are already lots of great walkthroughs out there so I won’t go in to much detail, but I’ll highlight the steps we took and the resources we used:

Upgrade:

Read up on VMware docs. I suggest you check out the new Topology and Upgrade planning tool from VMware which will give you the resources you should use

If you’re already on 6.7 you can do the upgrade directly in the VCSA admin interface. Note that the installer says it will run for 2-300+ minutes, but in our environment it finished in about 15 minutes

If you are on 6.5 or lower you’ll need to download the VCSA iso and run the upgrade wizard from there

If you have set up a backup schedule the converge job might fail, check out this article for details

Download the VCSA iso to have the converge tool available

Prepare the JSON file with correct data about your environment

Backup the environment

Run the convergence tool

Verify the environment and any integrations

If you have any other services using the external PSC for authentication you’ll need to point these to your embedded VCSA

If the above step has been completed and verified you can decommission your external PSC.

In our lab environment the process was pretty straight forward and we had only the issue explained about the backup policy in the VCSA. After removing this the convergence went smoothly and completed in about 15 minutes.